Seneca College — LSO 250 — Cultural Trash: Waste, Excess and Repression
ANALYTICAL ESSAY
Write a double-spaced analytical essay of roughly 750 words on a topic below. Be sure to have a clear thesis, and well written supporting analysis of course literature. This analysis is from your critical thinking. Do not use secondary sources (we will later prepare a research essay in the second half of the course).
- Explore human effects on the natural world, or vice versa, in a literary work.
- Discuss a writer’s treatment of the earth as a form of waste, and/or as a sign of human life. What kind of sign is it? What does it represent?
- Relate civilized culture with waste. How does a course writer address that relationship?
- Much of the literature we’ve read so far sifts through matter in search of something valuable. Explore how written work performs this archaeology.
- How does waste lead to repressed characters? Explore relations between physical waste and human repression in a course work.
- For some writers, literature attempts to unearth the buried consciousness of the public. How does underground matter arise?
- For some writers, cohesive literature is the goal; for others, anarchy is closer to the desired result. Discuss the function of a literary work that is harmonious, or the function of literature that unsettles the reader.
- Analyze how a work presents industry as it affects humanity and/or the earth.
- “Tear down the monuments,” wrote the philosopher Nietzsche. How might this destructive idea transform art and civilization in a positive direction? Use a course work for supportive analysis.
- Examine how the natural world is represented as an ecological system in a literary work from the course.
Please submit a double-spaced essay in MLA or APA style. Send by e-mail with an essay attached in Word to Mr A.
